Sunday, May 17, 2015

A Catholic thing

Let's see if I can clean out a few browser tabs...

Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin notes that except for the Catholic Church most American Christian denominations – including Southern Baptists and Mormons – are no longer taking much of a public stand against sexual minorities. Yes, some still rant from pulpits and some denominations still have restrictions of various kinds. But their public stance and political involvement has become muted.

The exception, as I said, is the Catholic Church. Which leads Kincaid to speculate that opposition to sexual minorities is shifting from a "Christian thing" to a "Catholic thing." And that shift is giving Protestant denominations space to be more welcoming to gay people.

Now a few thoughts of my own. Yeah, the current GOP presidential candidates are each trying to show they are more rabidly anti-gay than the next one. Something is driving that. It can't be the Catholic members because, in sharp contrast to the church hierarchy, they are widely gay-supportive. It must be the Fundamentalist Protestant members still pushing their candidates. And that means it appears the Fundamentalist Protestant hierarchy is keeping quiet and their members are pushing the GOP position, while the Catholic hierarchy is speaking out against sexual minorities while their members are much more pro-gay.

Digby writes the blog Hullabaloo, and he excerpts an article in Mother Jones about gun violence. In the last 10 years 750,000 have been injured by guns and 320,000 have been killed. Mass shootings are on the rise. So what is the cost to society of all this carnage?

We can find out the cost to society of motor vehicle crashes, including property damage, traffic congestion, pain, loss of quality of life, etc. But we can't find out the societal cost of gun violence. That reason is simple. The NRA won't allow anyone to do the research.

In another post Digby delves into the rise of ISIS, the Islamic State.

So the genesis of ISIS is really in the inane decision to "de-Bathify" and leave a bunch of highly trained soldiers (many of them trained by the US) humiliated and without any means of support --- then later imprison them all together for years so they could hatch plans to re-take the region and wreak revenge on their enemies. It could not be any dumber.

Digby also mentions what they were thinking about as they were hatching those plans: the techniques of the East German Stasi and how to use religion as a cover.

The post ends with a review of the book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, that documents the arrogance and ineptitude of the invasion of Iraq.